“Any of us could,” Angela snapped. “Gabe almost did. You might; I might. I’m not sticking around. Back to the car. I’m leaving in fifteen minutes, with or without you.”
She shoved back through the crowds up the dunes. I took Gabe’s arm.
“Let’s go.”
“We’re not seriously leaving Kate?”
“The longer we stay here, the more danger we’re in. We have to go now, or we never will.”
Gabe was pale in the moonlight. He looked around one more time; whether for Kate or for another shot at the black tide, I couldn’t tell. At last, he sighed and let me lead him up the beach. I kept my eyes on my feet, trying to avoid stepping in the slimy patches of black and the occasional splash of the immortals’ blood. The laughter and screaming made my ears ring.
Eventually clumps of dune grass replaced the black tide, and the slope led us up to safety. Angela stood at the top, arms folded like a general surveying the aftermath of battle.
“How the hell did you grow up here?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer.
The crowds weren’t diminishing; the force of them pressing towards the beach was like a second tide. We wove through it. I felt lighter and yet more anxious with every step. We were almost safe. We might make it out.
We might – but Kate might not. The twist in my stomach returned. I didn’t want to leave her, but I didn’t ever want to see the bloody, black-smeared beach again.
At last, the Jeep appeared. We each clambered in, locked our door, and sat in the darkness, waiting. My ears still rang.
Angela’s eyes were dull, her ochre skin made wan and grim by the yellow streetlamps. “Nine minutes.”
Gabe shook his head. “We should go back down.”
“Don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t go back out there.”
Someone pounded on my window and we shrieked. It was a young man, our age, flexing his arms and sticking his tongue out in a grotesque victory dance. His friends pounded his back in celebration. One hung back, quiet
“They lost someone,” I said softly.
The boys moved on. I wondered what school they went to.
“Eight minutes,” Angela murmured.
“I snuck down once,” I said. The confession burst out of me – I’d never told anyone before. I didn’t even want to tell my friends, not really, but even this was better than the silence. “I was thirteen. The black tide was common knowledge in our town, but my parents refused to talk about it. I guess they thought if they never brought it up, I’d forget about it.”
Angela scoffed. “How could anyone forget this?”
“I’d heard screams every fall since I was a baby. I guess I hoped it was fake, or exaggerated, so I went to see for myself. I planned to just touch one, just to see what it felt like, but then I saw...”
Nancy smiling, 33 forever, with a gun to her head; a flash, and the loudest noise. Blind, frozen panic while the eyes readjust, then Nancy again, holding the bullet, still smiling through the shining blood that coated her face.
“You saw what we saw,” Angela filled in.
“I was so afraid, I never even touched it. I refused to go to the beach at all for months. I thought the slime must stick to the sand, and I was afraid of the sand getting in my mouth and killing me.”
“Or making you live forever?”
“Gabe, Jesus, let it go.” Angela glared in the rearview mirror.
“You guys never touched it,” he said. “Once it’s in your hand, you just think, why not?”
I considered telling him, challenging him to continue to think that way after hearing how, as an eighth-grader, I’d seen a woman shoot herself in the head and then laugh about it. Angela was right, though: they’d all seen more or less the same thing tonight. If Gabe was still tempted, another gruesome anecdote wouldn’t reach him.
I would never forget, but maybe they still could.
“You made the right choice, Gabe,” I said firmly.
He nodded, but said nothing.
Silence returned. Occasionally shrill cries cut into the car. I could no longer distinguish between the ecstatic and the desolate.
Gabe squinted into the crowd. “Is that her?”
I twisted in my seat. A blonde girl made her way towards the car, walking slowly.
“It’s Kate!”
Angela unlocked the doors and started the engine. The brake lights illuminated Kate’s face. She was smiling.
Laura Duerr is a writer and social media coordinator from Vancouver, Washington. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Linfield College. Her other stories have appeared in Mad Scientist Journal and the anthologies Candlesticks & Daggers: An Anthology of Mixed-Genre Mysteries and Fitting In: Historical Accounts of Paranormal Subcultures.
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